Image source: Cover art by me, from a custom Second Life avatar run through Leonardo.
Leonardo AI can be such a damned tease. I ran this pretty good Second Life avatar through it:
The Leonardo avatar I got was just gorgeous. But I guess that tiny little microthong on the Second Life avatar defeated Leonardo and it screwed up the image. It ended the thong somewhere on the avatar's happy trail rather than over it's pussy. (Leonardo did get one image right: it put the tiny microthong where it belonged, half-buried in the Leonardo image's pussy. But even then, Smashwords is allergic to pussies. No tiniest vaguest bit of what might be a vagina can appear on a Smashwords cover. I've been dinged for it before. No visible genitalia, even for hardcore taboo erotica.
So I went with the Leonardo AI that had the best other features, which was the one above. Its interpretation of the pasties on the SL avatar was brilliant. The image had the sleek, tanned blonde look of a beach party girl. So I tried to make the thong work. But it was incredibly difficult because I went at it in the stupidest possible way. (I blame GIMP!) I wanted to just widen and extend the thong bottom so that it just barely covered the entire vagina instead of ending somewhere in the woman's happy trail region, leaving her pussy, such as it was, exposed.
All I really needed to do was cut and paste some pieces of the existing thong to get the shape I needed to pass Smashwords muster. That proved problematical however. The problem was that the bottom of the image's crotch was wide and distant from the top of the thong, and needed a lot of stretching and reshaping to reach where it needed to, and it had to follow natural lines from the top of the thong. The basic problem was my conception of the thong was all wrong, so I kept creating weirdly shaped thongs.
I finally decided my problem was the piece-by-piece approach, so I used GIMP's Cage Transform tool to create a thong that covered what it needed to. It seemed so plausible: you drew a cage outlining the object you want to change, with points set along the lines of the cage. When you grab a point and move it, the image changes to conform to the new outline of the cage. It seems like just the thing to create a thong that covered what it needed to.
This proved to be wrong. I created a layer that was just the thong itself, pasted it into a layer above the base image, and attempted to adjust the thong's dimensions. I had imagined moving the cage would keep the shapes being moved the same, and that the distance I moved the cage element would determine how much the image distorted. This turned out not to be true. Using the cage tool was very much like using the smudge tool. The smudge tool is a tool that will be very familiar to pastelists (people who create art with pastel sticks, not people who paste lists). It allows you to mix colors together by smudging them together with the tool, much as a pastel or charcoal artist smudges their chalk with his finger to mix it with nearby chalks. It's great tool, I use it often.
But what I got when I used the cage tool was a smudged, lumpy outline of the thong instead of the smooth-edged garment. And because the amount of distance the thong distorted did not match the amount of distance the cage points were dragged, it was verr hard to get the thong parts moved to where they needed to be. And of course when the cage points were dragged, the edges of the image were smudged as well as moved. So instead of an enlarged, differently-shaped thong I got a fuzzy, blobby approximation of the thong. After some obvious failures, I dumped the cage transform tool.
But a good thing did come out of it. One of the fuzzy thong outlines I got from the cage transform tool was shaped like a breech cloth instead of a thong. It looked like it was hanging loose between her legs instead of tucked between them. And I realized that that was a lot easier to build using cut and past, so I did that. And it looked even sexier than a thong that covered her entire pussy area, because it looked like it was hanging loose which meant her pussy was just hanging out there behind the breech cloth. The slightest breeze might flip the cloth aside revealing her pussy. Much sexier.
If you want an example of the way the smudge tool works when you've got the right task for it, notice that the image I worked with has transformed the ballgag in the Second Life Avatar's mouth into mouth hooks, or something like them. But the image on the cover wears a ballgag. What happened there was that one of the Leonardo AIs came out with a pretty good ballgag so I lopped off her head and shoulders and transplanted them to the one I used. I pasted the head into a layer over the base and fiddled with the color values and then merged it down with the other layer. There was a faint line where the shoulders were on top of the base because the colors did not exactly match. But I just took the smudge tool and mixed those colors together and now you absolutely cannot tell that the head on the cover is a transplant. No one would have ever known if I had not told everyone right here on this post. Handy thing, that smudge tool.
But what about the fully dressed Kim Halstead?
A modern professional woman, you betcha, courtesy of Leonardo AI.
My initial plan for finance banker Kim was to pick up an image from Deposit Photos. I knew they had tons of images of women in business suits, and tons of women with sexy bodies. So it seemed likely that they would have images of women with sexy bodies in business suits. I mean, c'mon.
Turns out I was wrong. There is a great gulf fixed between the bodies of women in business attire and women in bikinis, underwear or nothing. Sexy women often have curvy bodies. Business women are almost all thin and not curvy. Actually, among the ones I checked, "almost" is not required: none of them were curvy.
So I went back to Leonardo AI and did a text prompt to get the image above. It was easy, almost ridiculously so. The woman was clothed and not having sex and not doing anything that could be interpreted as having sex or being sexy, she was just standing there being bankerish. No censorship issues. I did get a certain amount of images of women who were not curvy, and images of women who looked overweight by not curvy. But I also got a certain amount of curvy women in business suits. Didn't take long at all.
And as a result I got banker Kim standing next to naked and gagged and bound Kim, who is also standing.
Finally, for the foreground I reused my Princess Gaia image from the cover of the book.
This time I used more of her body, but still left out the guy who's fucking her doggie style because of course that wouldn't fly for a book cover. I also had to emblonden her hair (just a matter of color cycling her hair and then pasting it in over her brown hair), since this is supposed to be another version of Kim, who is blond. The idea is to represent Kim as Banker Kim, Sexy Kim, and Fucked, Bound and Gagged Kim as she sinks into the pit of depravity that is Club Rape.
The prison with all the guards is leftover from my Club Rape cover. I made quite a few background images for that one, most of them unusable for that cover, but this one worked out well for this cover. What I liked about it was the cool colors, because it added depth to the image. Gaia/Kim in the foreground is in far warmer colors than the figures of Banker Kim and Naked Kim behind her, who were in much warmer colors than the guards and prison behind them.
Here's the cover all put together:
And here's what's happening to Gaia/Kim on the cover, just so you know:
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